From 17–19 April 2026, around 20 IOQ members, mostly from Canterbury, visited Reefton’s mines and explored the region’s rich mining history. Thanks go to John Crawley and Gary Payne of Speirs Finance for organising the trip. Bernie Napp of Prospect Consulting was also there.
Normally, what’s said on tour, stays on tour, but there’s room for exceptions. Besides talk on knee cures consisting of turmeric, milk and pepper, and machete-wielding tribesmen in the uplands of PNG, one story stands out.
A West Coast miner on firefighting duty at a roadside accident.
Man drives a van into a tree, ends up on the ground, one leg smashed up and the other missing. Ambulance driver at the scene, distraught at not stabilising him. Bloke in the front passenger seat, tattooed letters across his head. Open up the back of the van to find a large drum of something. Possibly diesel. Standing around in firefighting gear, a hot day, armed with a hose should the wreck catch fire. A call through to a specialist unit from Nelson to check things out. Three hours later they arrive.
Drum turns out to be full of something else. Street value, millions of dollars. Missing leg found. A prosthetic. A better than average day in the office – for the firefighters anyway.
At Blacks Point museum in Reefton, all the ancient mining machinery works. John Taylor opens a water sluice to run a stamper battery; heavily weighted pillars slowly crush a gold-bearing rock feed, and running water takes the powder across carpet to catch the yellow flakes. Back in the day a film of mercury spread on copper plate swallowed the gold, leaving the rest.
John is museum curator, geologist, and a mining historian. He guides us through a shed filled with the usual memorabilia, a block of antimony sulphide, visible gold in drill core, and a phonograph that actually works, broadcasting Victorian era sounds into the room.
Echo Mine up in the hills reveals a deep pit hemmed in by thick beech forest. Looking down at geology gone crazy; folded and refolded pale strata bend coal seams in every direction, sometimes bulging into large pods of coal, and elsewhere pinching out.
Francis Mining produces around 100,000 tonnes a year from one most challenging mines, most of it exported to Japan to make silicon metal for computer chips, carbon fibre, and carbon filters for water and oil purification.
In one direction, the former Radiant Mine is smoking, as it has done since the early 1960s. Workers had gone on holiday and left mined coal in boxes underground. The coal dried out and caught fire, lighting the wood. Mine manager Eamon Moynihan’s offer remains on the table, to put the fire out for the landowner, at their cost.
Plenty of rehab underway, the secret to good relations with the regulator. A mussel shell reactor treats historic mine drainage water. Two types of beech and manuka plantings, one at $120,000 a hectare using slash, the other at $30,000 using lotus major grass. The results speak for themselves.
Here, cheaper is better.
Reddale Mine the next morning in cold and damp weather, but spirits high. Jimmy Foster tours us around an operation that lifts and washes around 120,000 tonnes of coal a year. Some is used locally, and rest exported via Bathurst Resources, for overseas steelmaking.
The coal fines have another use entirely, and this part of Rosco’s operation is like an alchemy lab. Mix that with weathered mudstone, West Coast ironsands, gypsum waste from the saltworks in Marlborough, and crushed limestone. Add trace copper sulphate, selenium mineral, and iodite, and the result is an excellent natural fertiliser, tailored to farmers’ needs around New Zealand.
Back in Reefton, Rua Gold’s Andrew Mason walks us through the latest gold and antimony exploration results. A Fast-track approval application is underway for Auld Creek, just up an old forestry road from the township.
The grades look good for an underground mine, and being conservation land, the small footprint will make it that much easier to get an access arrangement. They’re spending $1 million a month to expand their drill results and the underground resource model.
Antimony is a popular subject; most of the world’s supply is locked up in China and Russia. Besides hardening steel alloys, the heavy metal is a fire retardant, stops EVs catching fire in a crash.
Reefton today is looking prosperous; freshly painted facades of commercial wooden buildings along the main street bring old times back to life as a new era of mineral wealth is underway.
An eerie feeling touring the Waiuta mine site where mining started in 1907 and finished abruptly in 1951 on the collapse of the Blackwater mine shaft. A few remaining chimneys, decaying concrete, and restored huts stand sentinel over what was once a bustling town out the back of beyond.
Life would have been tough hauling gold-bearing quartz to the surface for crushing in a stamper and dissolving in cyanide to win the gold. The Empire Hotel would have done a roaring trade.
Hundreds of metres beneath our feet, Endura Mining has driven tunnels more than three kilometres to tap the lower end of the Blackwater reef, and the signs are there’s as much gold as was taken back in the day, some 700,000 ounces of it.
No one knows how deep it goes.
To end the day, a few souls nosed around the recently reopened hydro that diverts some of the Inangahua River through a short canal into a race that feeds a turbine. This was the technology that in 1887 lit up 270 homes in Reefton, then the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to run on networked electricity.
Plenty to talk about for quarrymen over a beer or several in Reefton’s watering holes, Dawson’s the first night, and Wilson’s on Saturday.
Sunday morning, and a trip to Rosco’s yard just out of Reefton. He started out shovelling and trucking at Boatmans, later Solid Energy; he managed Echo before handing that over to Eamon, and his operations today run to 100 employees around the country. An immaculate workshop to care for Rosco’s classic cars abuts a labyrinth of mechanical and engineering hangars, all very tidy.
After admiring Rosco’s alluvial gold-mining gear, it’s time for a Jumping Goat, which is indescribable other than it looks like coffee, contains alcohol, and tastes like cough mixture –not a standing joke, but a standing order when visiting Rosco.
Off to Riley Perkins’ alluvial gold mine at Bell Hill. A smoothly run operation if you can weather wide fluctuations in ore grade. The gold price helps. In the distance, grazing land is all that remains of former mine workings. We borrow the land and put it back better than it was to begin with.
The tour ended with Glenys Perkins’ hospitality at Bell Hill Retreat. She and John Crawley are among trustees who are refreshing Minerals West Coast, the collective voice for West Coast miners and quarry operators.
In an election year and rickety political opinion polls, there’s more need than ever to keep promoting our industry. Critical minerals have to come from somewhere.
The IOQ Canterbury Branch organising committee says a big thanks to the following sponsors and supporters of this trip: Finlay Group, Porter Group, Speirs Finance, Kerry Reilly, Craig Stevenson, Rua Gold, Francis Mining, Rosco Contractors, John Taylor, Jimmy Foster, Titan Resources, Riley and Glenys Perkins.